You might have noticed on Friday, October 21, that some of your favorite websites weren’t working, Netflix, Twitter, Amazon, Spotify and others were all experiencing outages. As you no doubt have heard the cause were DDoS attacks on DYN, a domain service provider. At around 7:00am EST hackers unleashed one of the largest DDoS attacks which shut down many websites, they weren’t hit just once, but three times in the same day.

So what exactly is a DDoS attack? DDoS stands for a ‘Distributed Denial of Service' (DDoS). That basic concept is to overwhelm a website by making requests (traffic) from multiple sources. Hackers, build networks of infected computers, these infected computers are called ‘botnets’ and work on the hackers behalf and enables them to increase the severity of their attack.

Perhaps the scariest thing about such an attack is there is very little you can do to protect yourself. And as made evident by the recent attack on DYN, they have the capacity (likely hundreds of thousand of infected computers working together), to shut down large parts of the internet. Once of the reasons this particular attack was so effective was because of who it targets. Normally, hackers target specific organization like banks or government websites. Because they targeted DYN which provides domain names for many companies, they were targeting part of the internet infrastructure which allowed them to take down multiple websites at once.

It is very likely that Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows to be released, indefinitely and at the very least for a very, very long time. During the Ignite 2015 Conference Microsoft employee, Jerry Nixon stated that although Windows 10 has been released, it will be the last version of Windows and therefore development is ongoing. Does this mean the end of Windows? No, not at all – Windows is not going anywhere. What is really changing is the way in which Microsoft releases newer updated versions of its Windows software. Microsoft released a statement that helps clarify where they are headed with Windows. “Windows will be delivered as a service bringing new innovations and updates in an ongoing manner, with continuous value for our consumer and business customer.” Basically what this means is future updates, patches and version releases will be released under the Windows 10 brand or just “Windows”.

With all this being said when is the next big update likely to happen? It looks like it will be sometime in Spring of 2017, as of right now it looks like the next big update will come in March. However, if software releases have taught us anything it is that release dates don’t necessarily hold true so don’t hold your breath just yet.​There is suppose to be a second big update in 2017 as well, which at this point looks like it will come in late summer or early fall.